What Now?

Napping

On Monday, we had a professional development day at school; we did iPad training from 9:30 to 3:30, with only a 45-minute break for lunch. Now, it was all very interesting and helpful ... for the first three hours or so. After that, we all became increasingly wiped out and brain dead. Some faculty just left; I'm too much of a rule-follower for that and so hung on to the bitter end, but was increasingly resentful. The facilitator was really great, but I think it's a terrible idea to make people sit still and do the same thing for that many hours! We would never have our students do something like that; it's almost like we forget what good pedagogy looks like when we're designing lessons for teachers themselves.

Then, after that exhausting day, I had to go home and finish my spring break grading and getting ready for the final nine weeks of classes. My own fault that I still had work to do the night before the students returned, but I really had been assuming we'd have some time during the day to get work done, which is our usual M.O. on these professional development days.

Perhaps it's not a surprise that I then came home early on Tuesday (I don't teach the last period), ate a snack, and lay down on the couch for a three-plus-hour nap, after which I still slept for eight hours last night. And then I did something similar today, taking a two-hour nap after school. It was not a particularly restful spring break, and I think I have a lot of built-up tiredness.

But also it occurs to me that this could be a side effect of going on the Lexapro. I've had much less shakiness than I did last time, but I have had low-level nausea the last couple of days, and maybe the tiredness is related? Anyway, I'm going with the philosophy of "If I'm tired, go to sleep," so I guess I'll keep going with the naps this week. This isn't a sustainable practice in the long run, but my hard work on Monday night means I'm actually caught up with school stuff for the week, so I can afford to sleep so much this week.

I wound up cancelling my therapy appointment yesterday because I was feeling so exhausted that I felt kind of sick. So, ironically, I haven't yet told my therapist about the Lexapro because I was at home sleeping off what may be the effects of the Lexapro. We'll talk next week.

I'm taking the pill in the morning because it sometimes causes insomnia, but some people take it at night because it makes them sleepy, and perhaps I will switch to that practice in the long run. I have a follow up appointment with my doctor in three weeks, and we'll work it out then.

Thanks for the supportive comments about going on the antidepressants, by the way. I appreciate it!

Health update

Thanks for your well-wishes after my medical misadventure last Saturday night. I limped along all week, feeling slightly heroic that I was going to school each day like a trooper, although I was feeling more and more myself and thus less and less heroic as the week went on. The only things I missed all week were a department meeting on Tuesday so that I could go home and sleep after school (because that first day back, with four classes and a few student meetings, really did wipe me out), and one class today so that I could go see my doctor, plus a student event this evening I really should have gone to but was just too tired ater the doctor's appointment and the cumulative stress of the last week. I feel a little bad about this last omission, but I keep reminding myself to give myself a break because, seriously, it was perfectly reasonable to duck out of it under the circumstances.

So, here's the update from the doctor today. Fortunately, having staples taken OUT of one's scalp, while no picnic, doesn't hurt nearly as much as having them put INTO one's scalp. The doctor said that the wound was healing nicely, so no worries there.

They drew blood and are going to run anemia and other tests; when the results come back in next week, I'm probably going to wind up on iron supplements, which I'm not really looking forward to since iron tends to upset my stomach, but I'll learn to deal with that. The anemia levels that I had last week in the ER aren't enough on their own to cause the fainting, but I also tend to have low blood pressure, which means that I'm more than usually susceptible to feeling fainting (which has been true of me for years), so that means it's extra important for me to stay well-hydrated and have enough sodium and continue my usual practice of eating every few hours. So last Saturday, the combination of slight anemia and slightly low blood pressure could have combined with not quite enough food and water that day to make me feel light-headed.

Plus, she suggested that I go on birth control pills or a hormone IUD to reduce my periods, which have gotten extremely heavy in the last couple of years, such that they are probably a major contributor to my anemia. But first she wants to do an ultrasound to make sure that I don't have uterine fibroids, which are benign but do cause heavy periods and could be treated or even removed surgically. So I have that ultrasound scheduled for late March. The word "surgery" scared me a little, but then I looked up fibroids online and saw that it can be done as an outpatient procedure, so not such a big deal.

I've also been having weird shortness of breath from climbing stairs over the last couple of months, even though I exercise and think of myself as in reasonably good shape for a non-athletic middle-aged person. And that, too, can be a symptom of anemia, so I'm hoping that the iron supplements that I'll probably start taking next week will take care of that shortness of breath problem in reasonably short order; apparently anemia, especially when it's pretty mild, can be treated pretty quickly.

As far as last Saturday goes, the doctor said that if I had just thrown social convention to the wind and gotten down on the floor right away at Costco as soon as I felt faint instead of trying to soldier through it, I probably wouldn't have fainted, and thus obviously wouldn't have hit my head. (Well, actually she didn't say any of the stuff about social convention -- that's me -- but she did say I should have just lain down.) Certainly my experience of feeling faint in the past has been that if I can at least sit down and getting something to eat and drink and some cool air or a cool cloth, I'm fine. I still can't quite picture how that would have worked out in Costco that day, but of course it's not like I was more socially acceptable by fainting dead away than I would have been if I had just abandoned my cart and sat down on the floor somewhere! And quite frankly, I think that's what I would have done if I hadn't already been in line to check out when I started feeling cold and clammy.

So the good news is that (a) nothing serious is wrong with me, and everything that is slightly amiss can be treated easily, and (b) none of this in any way interferes with my South Africa trip, which starts two weeks from today! Yay! I am going to make sure that I have snacks and water with me at all times on the trip, since my experience of traveling is that one can't necessarily control when and under what circumstances one is eating and resting, and I assume that will be especially true when traveling with such a big group that is being run by an educational tour company. I want to make sure that I enjoy the trip thoroughly, so that will mean I need to take some initiative to maintain my own health and comfort -- no problem.

And on that note of self-care, I'm going to publish this and go to bed. One of the good things to come out of last week's medical misadventure is that I've been making sure to get plenty of sleep this week and have really scaled back on the amount of work I'm bringing home in the evenings. That does mean I have a shit-load of grading to do this weekend, but that probably would have been the case anyway since it's the end of term and also since, quite frankly, I'm not very efficient in the evenings even when I do bring work home. So in the spring term, I'm going to seriously commit to only doing reading and class prep in the evenings (since that's the fun stuff), and keeping the grading to my free periods and right after school and a few hours on the weekend, when I work much more quickly and efficiently. In fact, since Ash Wednesday was this week, I decided to make this my Lenten discipline -- not a traditional discipline, of course, but there will be no fasting for me, lest I faint away again!

An overexciting Saturday night

Last night D. and I were gearing up for a typical Saturday night, which is to say that I decided to run to Costco and buy, among other things, a pizza for that night's dinner, which we would eat while watching a video. Because that's how exciting our lives are here in Adventure City.

But instead what happened is that, as I was standing in line to checkout, I suddenly started feeling very bad indeed -- cold sweat, clamminess, feeling like I was either going to throw up or pass out. I crouched down, holding onto the conveyer belt, and the cashier asked me in concern if I was all right (since I clearly wasn't!), and I asked if she could get me a cup of water. I stood up to take off my jacket since I was feeling so clammy ... and the next thing I knew, I was lying flat on my back, with a ring of concerned faces around me.

Yep, I passed out, falling straight back and hitting my head very hard on the concrete floor -- and possibly on the cart behind me, although no one could say for sure whether that was the case. I was apparently out cold and twitching a little for about 6 seconds and then came to. Costco employees called 911, stayed with me until the EMTs took over, called D. twice to let her know what was going on -- I'm definitely writing the store a thank you card!

And then I had my very first experience with EMTs, ambulances, the whole nine yards. They put me in a neck brace and strapped me to a backboard, just as a precaution since I'd hit my head, and I've now had my first ambulance ride, which made me a little carsick but was otherwise interesting. The EMT who was working with me in the back was really nice and reassuring and kept calling me "honey," which is the kind of thing that might annoy some people but made me feel very safe and cared for. (I'd love to know what they call men, since I'm assuming they wouldn't call them "honey.") After I got admitted to the ER, the EMTs stopped by to say goodbye and "hope you feel better" before they left -- very nice men indeed. In the store and in the ambulance, they kept asking me all sorts of questions to assess my cognition -- my birthday, what day it was, did I know where I was, etc. -- and then they asked me my age, and I said "43. Wait, no, 44. I think. Hmm, let me do the math -- yes, 44" and then assured them that my uncertainty on this point had nothing to do with hitting my head but simply with having reached the age where I don't tend to keep track of my age so much.

And then I was at the hospital for hours and hours because they wanted to check everything and monitor me for awhile. Fortunately, D. had brought all sorts of things that she thought might make me more comfortable (especially if I'd been admitted), so I had a little neck pillow that made those hours more comfortable than they would have been otherwise. Folks were very nice to me, but it was a long night, and my head was bleeding and hurt, and I was really cold despite the warmed blankets they kept putting on me (at one point I had a serious shivering attack, which I think was maybe an aftereffect of the adrenaline from the whole experience, as were my tears once D. arrived in the ER and we were alone for a moment), and mostly I just wanted to go home. Plus, the nearest hospital, which is the one the EMTs took me to, is a Catholic hospital, which I didn't realize until I put my glasses on and realized there was a crucifix on the wall, which gave me an unpleasant St. Martyr's flashback, such that when the intake person asked my marital status I hesitated for a moment before saying "married." But in fact they were all totally cool and treated D. as the spouse she is in this state (which was another one of those moments when I realize that, although I'd love to live closer to my family, I don't want to give up the status of being legally married to my spouse, which significantly limits the number of states I'm willing to live in).

I got a catscan, and everything looked fine, so they eventually released me after 11 p.m. that night. They don't know exactly what made me pass out, but I was slightly anemic, so I'm supposed to follow up on that with the doctor. My blood sugar was really high when they brought me in, which is weird since normally when I feel kind of faint the problem is low blood sugar and I eat a little something and am fine, but apparently the stress of the whole experience could have made my sugar spike after the fact, so they can't really tell what my blood sugar was at the time I fainted. I'm also supposed to follow up with the doctor about possible diabetes, although that's more of a "ruling things out" issue, since the doctor didn't think that was what was up.

I also wound up with a skull laceration from the fall and now have 9 staples in my head, which I'll get removed on Friday afternoon when I go to see the doctor for all of this other follow up. Getting those staples put in was far and away the worst part of the whole experience -- "you'll feel a slight pinch," my ass! Plus, getting the wound cleaned out hurt like hell -- not just the stinging but also the whole area is terribly bruised -- and in fact I threw up from the pain, another little bonus of the experience.

The whole evening pretty much sucked, of course, but I'm kind of jazzed at the possibility that it was all caused by anemia, since that might explain a few other symptoms I've had lately: terribly heavy periods in the last couple of years; and in the last few months, shortness of breath just from going upstairs, even though I'm in reasonably fine shape, and a general lack of energy such that I'm pretty much always wiped out. It looks like anemia is pretty easy to treat (and D. went out today and bought me Cream of Wheat and blackstrap molasses for iron-rich breakfasts), and I'd be quite pleased to discover that these other symptoms that I assumed were just about aging are instead about a lack of iron in my blood that could be taken care of fairly quickly. Of course, I would just as soon have made that discovery without fainting and hitting my head, but I guess beggars can't be choosers.

Fortunately, this is a long weekend, so I've got a couple of days to rest and recuperate before going back to school on Tuesday. I'd be perfectly willing to call in sick if I had to, but I don't think that will be necessary. I get to take a shower tomorrow morning (I'm supposed to keep my head wound dry for 24 hours), and I've done a little reading and a little grading today and am feeling okay, so I see no reason that I shouldn't be just fine for Tuesday morning. But none of this is exactly how I was planning on spending my long holiday weekend!

So, it turns out that stress is bad for the body.

Who knew?

Last week I started thinking I was getting an ear infection, but it wasn't bad enough that I felt the need to do anything about it. Or, rather, I kept thinking I should do something about it but kept forgetting to do so, because I've been pretty spacy lately.

And then this week it got really bad, but I started thinking that maybe it wasn't my ears at all but rather my jaw and that this was affecting my ears. I tend to clench my teeth unconsciously when I'm stressed, and I often feel jaw discomfort as though I can't relax my face muscles even when I have my mouth open and thus clearly aren't clenching my teeth. So maybe I'm clenching my jaw muscles even when I'm not clenching my teeth? Is that possible?

Anyway, this was a crazy, hectic, stressed-out week, and by Thursday night my jaw was so tight, especially on the left side, that it hurt to chew. And then that night  my ears hurt so badly that they kept waking me up in the night. And when I got up Friday morning, my front teeth were meeting oddly, as though my whole mandible had shifted. I haven't had such jaw pain this badly since I was at St. Martyr's, when during a particularly grim period I couldn't close the teeth on the left side for almost three weeks. And yet I didn't go to the doctor about it then, I guess since it was so clearly stress-related and I didn't think there was anything the doctor could do (other than prescribe Lexapro, which I was already taking).

But apparently I've learned something since my St. Martyr's days, because when I woke up in pain on Friday, I finally called the doctor and made an appointment for that afternoon. (And I think it's only because I'd hit all of my deadlines by Thursday after school that I could think about my health rather than the drafts-reading / advisor letters / everything else school work that had obsessed me all week.)

The good news is that I don't have an ear infection and I don't have TMJ. Yay! But the doctor gave me muscle relaxants to take at night, told me to take massive doses of ibuprofin twice a day, and instructed me to get an over-the-counter sleep guard for my teeth for immediate treatment and see my dentist next week to see about getting a custom-made sleep guard (which apparently cost around $500).

I have followed her instructions (except for the dentist, whom I'll call on Monday), and my jaw and ears are actually feeling better. The muscle relaxants pack quite a wallop but seem to do the trick. I took one on Friday night, and it was almost impossible to pull myself out of bed Saturday morning at 6:00 a.m. so that I could go proctor SATs. And then I broke out into a horrible, light-headed, cold sweat at about 6:30, which was most unpleasant! But I had a lot of chemicals in my body at that point, since I'd also gotten a tetanus and hepatitis vaccine at the doctor's on Friday afternoon in preparation for my South Africa trip in March. I tried the muscle relaxant again last night, knowing I could sleep as late as I wanted to this morning, and apparently it takes about 10 hours of sleep for it to wear off. So I don't think I'll be able to take them during the week, but the doctor said they were optional and that I shouldn't take them if I didn't like how they made me feel. I've been diligent about the ibuprofin, which she said was the more important part of the treatment. The mouth guard is fairly unpleasant, and both nights I've awakened in the middle of the night and taken it out, so I'm not thrilled at the thought of paying a dentist $500 to get one, even if it will be a better fit and more comfortable. We'll see.

What the doctor didn't say but would clearly be a good idea is to relax a little as well. Having gotten through the particularly grim stretch of deadlines last week, I actually have far less on my plate this coming week and should be able to relax a bit, but obviously the goal is to have my stress levels a little under my own control rather than at the mercy of external circumstances. I haven't quite figured out how to do that.

Here are the things that I think are stressing me out:

• D's school stuff. There's actually nothing I can do about any of this other than to be a supportive spouse, and intellectually I know that nothing is gained from working myself up into a tizzy about problems that I can't address. But being able to act on what we know intellectually is, of course, not always easy. The problem is that anxiety about her school difficulties then leads me to worry about her career and about our financial prospects and whether we'll ever be able to retire and ... and ... and. Once I start down that path, my anxiety spirals out of control, so clearly the thing to do is simply not to start down that path.

• My school stuff. Same ol', same ol' here, but it's certainly true that having a flat bunch of freshmen is making school a lot less fun than it usually feels. They are actually getting better, fortunately, but somehow my enthusiasm for them hasn't picked up much. And three preps is wearing me out, and I know that my teaching is just not as good (or at least it doesn't feel as comfortable) as last year. But I've already told my department chair that I don't want to do three different preps next year, so it's just a matter of getting through this year. And I need to be both more realistic and more forgiving about grading. One reason this week was so crazy is that I was reading drafts that my AP Comp students turned in; these were research papers, each on a different topic of the students' own choosing (although I approved them), and it seriously took me 45-60 minutes for each one; so that was 18 extra hours of work this week, and I was rushing to get them done as quickly as possible so that they had as much revision time as possible. And this particular stressor was easy to anticipate, and yet somehow I hadn't really thought about how long it would take, especially in a week in which I also had to write personal letters to the parents of my eight advisees, updating them about how their daughters were doing at the midpoint of the year. So I really need to pay more attention to the workload I'm putting on myself and to schedule that workload more carefully and be willing to spread it out a little more. I'm one of the fastest graders in the department and indeed among all of the humanities teachers, and it's okay for me to take a few more days to return work. (I wonder if I should actually consider wearing a mouth guard while I grade? I think that's when I do a great deal of my jaw clenching.) Plus, school is traditionally my sanctuary when worry over D.'s stuff gets out of control, so I need to not let stress affect that sanctuary as it did this past week!

• General adult stuff. I'm feeling less and less like a competent adult these days -- in which the definition of "competent adult" is someone who keeps the house clean, the finances straightened out, the various home projects maintained, etc. (Being an adult is not the same as being a professional; I'm very good at the latter, if fairly incompetent at the former.) I've definitely been approaching system failure ("clean all the things?"). I think my new rule on this front is that I will to do one and only one "adult" thing each day -- that's it. I must do that one thing, but I won't do any more. I think my one thing today will be to balance the checkbook.

• The South Africa trip. This I just need to calm down about so that I actually enjoy the trip when it happens. Yes, there are things that I want to get for the trip (good walking shoes, a new camera, some pants that will work well for travel but still look reasonably nice), but I'll just make each of those my "adult thing" for a day. And now I've gotten my tetanus and hepatitis shots, so that's done; I still need to go to the travel clinic on general principle (mostly to get an antibiotics prescription to have with me just in case I pick anything up), but that's no big deal. And I could always read more about South Africa, of course, but this isn't my doctoral oral exams; it's okay for me not to know everything; I've already read a lot, and if I don't read any more, I'm still in good shape to get a lot out of the trip. I think I've been putting a lot of pressure on myself with this, and there's really no need.

I have been trying to be mindful about exercise and sleep, although both of those went by the wayside this past week. But it's Sunday morning, a brand-new week, and I'll try again.

A new normal

Yesterday afternoon, I switched my Weight Watchers goal from losing weight to maintaining my current weight. I get 6 more points a day, which feels like a great luxury!

Honestly, this turn of events is really just my acknowledgement of reality. I haven't been working at losing weight for a couple of months ... really, ever since WW released their new system in November; the new system is probably better science (it seems to account more for sugars than the older system), but it messed with my WW rhythm; suddenly I was finding it difficult to stay within my daily points, so I promptly stopped being diligent about logging my food -- I'm apparently all about success and have no use for a system in which I'm not earning regular gold stars. And lo and behold, I gained about five pounds over the holiday season, which I was very grumpy about but which was an entirely to-be-expected result of basically eating whatever I wanted for about a month.

So one of my goals in January was to lose those additional pounds, but I was still finding it difficult to commit to logging my food; I'd start out all gung-ho on Sunday (my weigh-in day) but would peter out by Tuesday. And my weight was holding very steady at about four to five pounds more than the goal weight that I had somewhat arbitrarily chosen last spring.

But the one thing I was doing well was exercising. D. and I gave ourselves a Christmas present of EA Sports Active, a workout program for the Wii, and wow, that thing is a serious workout! Such a workout that I really had to build up to it (and fortunately they have a program for exactly that purpose), but now I'm in the midst of a seriously hard-core 9-week boot camp on the program, and I'm working out very hard four times a week for half an hour. WW seems to think that EA Sports Active is the same level of exercise as our old Wii workouts, even though the former has me working much, much harder, so I still only get 2 activity points for a 35-minute workout, but I can tell that I'm getting stronger and that my muscles are more defined. I've been getting compliments at work in the last couple of weeks, and although I keep telling folks that I haven't lost any more weight, they continue to say that I'm looking darn good!

Then, this past Sunday, I dutifully weighed myself (that's been the only thing I've been dutiful about in WW for the last couple of months!) ... and lo and behold, my weight had dropped a couple of pounds! I didn't trust the number, but the next day I weighed myself again and got the same result. It's still three pounds more than my goal, but honestly, I picked that goal just because it was a round number. In reality, who cares?

So yesterday I decided that I was tired of feeling guilty about being a negligent WW-er, that I actually felt good about my body right now, and that what I needed was simply some structure so that this weight becomes the new normal, something I can maintain with normal eating and normal exercise.

So I've made the switch, declared my current weight the new normal, and settled into maintenance. This feels like a good change, one that acknowledges all of the weight loss of the past year (a total of 29 pounds!) but doesn't keep putting unreasonable pressure on me to lose any more when that doesn't really seem necessary. I'm holding out hope for the new normal.

Not exactly svelte, but ...

I've never been quite zaftig, lacking the confidence to rock the big-and-beautiful look, but I have gotten larger and increasingly felt dumpy over the last few years. When I went in for my annual thyroid checkup this winter, the doctor told me that my weight was holding steady ... but, I realized, holding steady at 30 pounds more than it had been 10 years ago! I've been vaguely unhappy about my weight for years now without doing anything about it, but then a couple of months ago even my "big" clothes started feeling a little snug. But I didn't have the energy to do anything about the fact that my weight was creeping up.

And then -- and I know this will seem completely unrelated! -- I found a church I liked. (And that continues to go well, although sometimes I forget; this morning, the sermon started, and I prepared to zone out -- my preferred option for dealing with insipid preaching -- until suddenly I remembered that I was now in a church I liked and that the sermon would be worth listening to! As indeed it was!) And somehow having that piece of my life finally fall into place, after so many years of struggling (not to say that I don't still have theological struggles, because I certainly do, but I now have a supportive place in which I can carry on those struggles), seems to have freed me up to deal with the next piece of my life that needed squaring away: my body.

Not that I'm gearing up to win any beauty contests. (And I have the ridiculously good fortune to be married to someone who thinks I'm beautiful even at my dumpiest. Crazy woman -- what is she thinking?!) But I've been a little worried about my low energy levels in the last couple of years; indeed, I'd been hoping that my thyroid doctor would tell me that I just needed a little more thyroxin and would simply give me a bigger pill to take care of all of my problems, but no such luck. But I would like to have a lot more energy; it scares me to be so tired so often at 42, since I'm hoping that I'm only halfway through with my life at this point.

So, six weeks ago I joined Weight Watchers ... and it's totally working for me so far! I've lost 9 pounds, so this is all about slow, sustainable weight loss, and so far the eating program really hasn't been any big deal at all. Of course, it helps both that D. is a good cook and very supportive of this process and that the FGS dining center has an amazing salad bar. It also helps that I started exercising at least three times a week back in January (thanks to my lovely calendar and stickers!), so I've just added the calorie-control to an exercise plan I already had.

I'm doing the program online, assuming that going to meetings would annoy the hell out of me, and it turns out the obsessive online record-keeping is tailor-made for me. You know how I am about earning gold stars, right? The online program gives them to me! For heaven's sake, I get a smiley face when I take my daily multivitamin! And I've already gotten a lovely star for losing 5 pounds, and another for hitting my initial 5% weight-loss goal. Clearly this program was built for people like me. And the fact that it's not very restrictive means that I've happily stayed on this plan longer than any other diet I've ever undertaken, and I can easily imagine maintaining some version of this for the long-haul.

I also have all the benefits of going to meetings without the annoyance of actually, you know, going to meetings. Two of my colleagues are also doing WW, and so we have little confabs about how much we've lost, what challenges we face, etc. Mostly we just cheer one another on.

I still want to lose another 20 or so pounds, but that 9 lbs. I've already lost is about a dress size, and yesterday I went "shopping" in our basement and found a few pieces of clothing that I haven't been able to wear in a couple of years. And D. has more than once commented to me in the last month that I seem to have more energy than she's seen in a long time. So this has been a very positive turn of events thus far!

I will admit that, in the first week on the program, my conversation was annoyingly full of how many points various foods were worth, but I got over that pretty quickly, and I promise that this is not going to become a weight-loss blog. But I wanted to share with you all this new element of my daily life that seems full of promise.

I suddenly have such high hopes for this summer, imagining what it will be like to once again be a person who's happy to wear shorts, who has a spring in her step, who wakes up full of energy and keeps it going for much of the day.

The trials of pursuing mental health

The Summer of Health is going well but is rather exhausting thus far, with today the hardest of all. Wednesday afternoons are my weekly appointment with Dr. Avuncular, my new therapist. I like him so far, in part because he's avuncular (hence the name) and because he's conversational; indeed, I think he'd like to be more conversational, but I've been talking, talking, talking for our four sessions thus far.

Today we had the big Family-of-Origin talk, which means I talked a lot about my mother. Always hard, and for some reason particularly hard today. We talked about that internalized voice, the one that makes everything a moral test that I've failed, the one that says I'm never good enough, the one that says I'm an ongoing disappointment. As I said to Dr. Avuncular, I'm actually not even sure that my mom really thinks these things; in fact, I'm pretty sure she doesn't think them as often as I think them in her voice. It's really that I've so internalized her disapproval over the years that my inner voice is probably far more critical and negative than she is. Dr. Avuncular asked me how long I anticipated feeling responsible for trying to please her and live up to her impossible standards, and I said, "Until she dies. No, maybe longer than that." And then I burst into tears. All very draining.

I've certainly talked all about this in therapy before, back in Grad School City, 9 years or so ago. But since then, a few things have changed, especially the fact that my brother and I seem to have switched places in my mom's eyes; he's now the Good Kid, and I'm the Bad Kid, since apparently my mom always needs one of each. Mostly this happened because he produced grandkids for her and I didn't. It's totally his turn to be appreciated in the family (if one accepts that there can only be one of each, which of course I reject), but I think I haven't properly grieved the loss of that Good Kid status, and I keep trying to get it back and of course failing. Hence my pathological need for more and more "gold stars" in life.

So now I have homework for next week (although he's very cool about not imposing things and says I should consider doing this homework if I think it's helpful and that next week we can talk about how it felt, whether or not I did it); every morning and every night I'm supposed to look into the mirror and say something to the effect of, "I hear your voice loud and clear, Mother, and I appreciate everything you've tried to do for me, but I'm an adult now and can make my own decisions about my way forward." I'm not looking forward to this homework, but I do think that letting go of the need for more and more gold stars would be a major step forward for me, so I will do it.

What's irritating about all of this is that I totally understand the entire situation intellectually -- I can talk about generational patterns, I can explain my own behavior in light of family dynamics, etc. -- but that isn't the same as being able to let go of these destructive patterns. And that space between what I know intellectually and what I feel emotionally is totally annoying to me!

As you can imagine, it was a very difficult conversation with Dr. Avuncular. I left feeling kind of shaky and indulged in some retail therapy -- I bought a hose-winder and lightbulbs at the hardware store, so not exactly out-of-control retail therapy -- and then I ate french fries, and then I went to the library, and then I bought myself Oreos (although only the smaller box of 12 cookies, because I didn't want to be too self-destructive), and still I spent most of the evening feeling kind of upset. It was only when one of our cats hopped up on my lap and started doing that kneeding thing on my stomach that I relaxed and felt comforted.

So now I'm going to go do my therapy homework and then recover by taking myself off to bed at 9:30 to read a little; maye the cats will curl up with me as well, which will be comforting. And D. will be home from work pretty soon and will give me a smooch. And by next week, I should be fortified enough by the goodness of my life to be able to wade into these mental health waters once again.

Summer of Health

Okay, I have all of these final exams to grade, which means of course that I'm in major procrastination mode. So here's one of my major summer projects: I'm proclaiming this the WN Summer of Health!

Here's the hope/plan/thought --

• Physical health: My eating spiraled out of control last October (the Halloween candy was not my friend!) and never came back under control, and my exercise habit has petered to a complete zero such that even my used-to-be-standard half-hour walks are no more. I don't want to be old before my time, which means that I need to start prioritizing my health. Unfortunately, this is much more of a goal that I think I should have than one to which I'm deeply committed, which worries me a little about its outcome.
• Mental health: I had a first appointment with a new therapist today; I'm calling him the Avuncular Dr. D., and I think it has a pretty good chance of working out. We shall see.
• Spiritual health: God and I need to get square, and I'm thinking this is the summer to start doing my part. I'm back to combing Adventure City to find a parish, and I'm also thinking of finding a spiritual director.
• Financial health: After last week's money meltdown, I decided that I need to get my act together and find an investment counselor (or whatever they call themselves) and that this was the summer to make that happen. I've also taken on a course overload in the fall (to cover a colleague's maternity leave), which is going to be absolutely exhausting but will bring in a nice chunk o' change, and I'll be making some extra cash this summer thanks to various irons I have in the fire. Plus D and I have a meeting tomorrow morning to do the paperwork for refinancing our mortgage to take advantage of the even lower interest rates right now. So this seems like a good time to do some long-term planning and put some systems into place so that I don't feel so anxious about money so much of the time. I know that financial health may seem out of place with physical, mental, and spiritual health, but I see the former as reducing my stress levels so that I have more energy for the latter three elements.

So that's the summer ahead. I have a clearer path for the mental and financial health components and feel fairly unmotivated about the physical health goal and sort of so-so about the spiritual health piece of this. There will be further reports as I start pursuing each of these.

There's one other summer goal, but writing about that will have have to wait until later this week, because the next order of business is to tackle those blue books. Summer can't start until grades and comments are posted.

Progressive bleg

... of the glasses sort, not the political sort.

I got my first set of progressive lenses in the fall, and they're working out fine. But here's the problem: I finally got around to ordering sunglasses, from another place than I ordered my glasses, and now I'm hating the new sunglasses, which give me a horrible sort of motion sickness if I wear them too long. I was almost in tears when I picked them up and realized that they weren't really working, but the guy adjusted them (which made them slightly but not really better) and told me to take them home for the weekend and see if I got used to them. Big surprise, I didn't get used to feeling sick, so now I need to bring them back.

One of the problems may be that I got the two sets of glasses from different places, and apparently there's no industry standard regulating the size of the various sight fields in one's glasses, so these sunglasses have different long-distance, medium-distance, and close-distance fields (that is, different sizes and shapes) than my regular glasses. Doesn't that seem bizarre to you?

If that is actually the case, then it seems to me that I must always buy all of my glasses from the same store in order to avoid major adjustment every time I switch glasses, which just seems wrong.

Another question: I know that some folks who wear progressive lenses get their sunglasses in only the long-distance prescription (i.e., not progressive lenses at all). What's the theory behind this, and do you all think it's a good idea? I guess it would get me out of the current situation, although actually the long-distance field is the one most problematic in my current sunglasses, so maybe it would be going from bad to worse.

If there's no good solution, I can get the money back for the sunglasses, so I'm not looking at a major loss here (except that I'd have to go buy new frames and lenses from the more expensive place, so that would be a big expense), but I feel like I've wandered into a whole new set of problems that I hadn't anticipated when I first made the progressives switch several months ago.

Hoping for a season of rejuvenation

It has indeed been the restful weekend that D and I were hoping for. Our big outing was going out for an early dinner last night, but we were back home in our pajamas at 7:30 pm. Mostly we lazed around. I made delicious applesauce-chocolate chip cookies. I got back to the quilt project that had languished for the last couple of weeks. After the Sarah Caudwell novel, I started reading Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, which I'm enjoying far more than I had thought I would. Today I went for a walk in the cold and breezy but clear air. I finished our taxes. I did a couple loads of laundry. D. played guitar, and I fooled around with ukulele. We were on no schedule at all. All in all, it was a lovely and relaxing weekend.

As you know, I've been feeling blue off and on for much of this winter, but weekends like this one -- in which I deliberately take care of myself, get some fresh air and sleep, and intentionally involve myself in activities designed to pull me out of my own head -- give me great hope for the spring.

One of the other things I've done, of course, is started seeing a psychiatrist three weeks ago. I'm not sure this relationship is going to work out well. She's nice enough and smart enough, but there's something that's just not quite clicking. Honestly, in looking at my calendar with those appointments penciled in, I feel a sort of mild anxiety, facing an engagement I'm not exactly dreading but not looking forward to or thinking will be particularly productive. I just want someone I can talk with a little more easily. She was the very first counselor I met with, so I guess it's not exactly surprising that it's not a perfect fit. But I hate to "break up" with her -- so awkward -- and I hate to go back to the drawing board.

But I do want to keep going on this path toward wellness. So if that means picking up the phone, I guess that's what I'll have to do.